1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and an information processing method, more specifically, allowing a user to output a printing result as desired while performing efficient processing.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, due to the improved capabilities of printers, bookbinding printing has become readily available in office environments. With the availability of bookbinding printing, an increasing number of users desire to perform bookbinding printing to generate documents such as copies of insurance policies. In the bookbinding printing process, a user may desire to always place a specified final page on the end (i.e., the back cover) of the book. The term “bookbinding printing” as used herein assumes that a plurality of sheets are stacked and folded in half to generate a book.
To this end, a technique has been developed in which a blank page is inserted between print job pages to adjust the number of pages so that a final page can be placed on the back cover of the book. FIGS. 12A and 12B show examples of bookbinding printing in which blank pages are inserted to place a final page on the back cover of the book. FIGS. 12A and 12B are prior art diagrams showing a printed product produced using bookbinding printing, as viewed from the lateral side thereof, where the total number of pages for a print job is five.
Sheets of paper 703 and 704 are placed against one another. In a book 701 produced using a standard bookbinding printing method shown in FIG. 12A, three blank pages are additionally inserted after a final page, or the fifth page. In a bookbinding printing method shown in FIG. 12B in which a page to be placed on the back cover (last page) of a book 702 is designated, on the other hand, three blank pages are inserted before the fifth page. As a result, the fifth page is printed on the back cover of the book 702.
A technique of the related art for producing the book 702 shown in FIG. 12B is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-224027. In this technique, first, all pages of a paper document are scanned, and the number of blank pages required is determined on the basis of the total number of pages of the paper document. Then, the determined number of blank pages are inserted so that a final page can be placed on the back cover of the book.
There has also been developed an application for inserting a blank page during the printing of a file of which the total number of pages is determined in advance, such as a Portable Document Format (PDF) document.
However, there arises a problem with the technique of the related art described above when it is applied to an application for performing overlay printing using a fixed section (form) of a document and attachment data.
An application for performing overlay printing will be described with reference to FIG. 13. FIG. 13 is a diagram showing an example of overlay printing using form data and attachment data. First, a user specifies a multi-form setting file 301 and an attachment data item 302 in an overlay printing library. FIG. 14 is a diagram showing an example of the content of a multi-form setting file. The multi-form setting file includes a job attribute 501 and form attributes 502 and 503. In the job attribute 501, a setting such as a print attribute of the overall job is described. In the example shown in FIG. 14, bookbinding printing is designated as a job attribute. In the form attributes 502 and 503, reference information of individual forms and the designated print attribute are described. For example, the form attribute 502 describes that a form having a file name “form 1.fcp” is to be used. A combination of settings in the form attribute 502 is defined as a name “form A”. A combination of settings in the form attribute 503 is defined as a name “form B”.
Forms will now be described. FIG. 15 is a diagram showing an example of a form. The form is composed of a fixed section 401 that is printed fixedly regardless of what kind of data is to be inserted, and a field (region) 402 into which attachment data is inserted.
An attachment data file will now be described. FIG. 16 is a diagram showing an example of an attachment data file 600. The attachment data file 600 is composed of form designation sections 601 and 603, and attachment data sections 602 and 604 to be inserted in the field 402.
An overlay printing application reads the attachment data file 600 and the multi-form setting file shown in FIG. 14, and analyzes designated forms. In the example shown in FIG. 16, the “form A” is designated. Then, the overlay printing application analyzes the multi-form setting file shown in FIG. 14 to recognize that the form to be used in the “form A” is represented by “form 1.fcp”. Then, the overlay printing application inserts attachment data “aaa” 309, which is designated in the data section 602, into the “form 1.fcp” field. The overlay printing application executes the process described above on all attachment data items 309-311 to obtain printing results 306 to 308 shown in FIG. 13. The series of processes described above is referred to as “overlay printing”.
As described above, an overlay printing application generally generates a print job while analyzing attachment data. Therefore, the total number of pages for the print job is variable and depends on the attachment data. In other words, the total number of pages is not fixed during the printing process performed in the overlay printing application and is unknown until all attachment data items have been analyzed. If the total number of pages is unknown, it is difficult to calculate the number of blank pages to be inserted to place a final page on the back cover of the book even with the use of the technique of the related art described above. In the overlay printing application configured to generate a print job while analyzing attachment data, therefore, a final page may not necessarily be placed on the back cover of the book and a user may not necessarily output a printing result as desired.
Such a situation is illustrated in FIG. 17. FIG. 17 is a diagram showing a problem with the related art. In FIG. 17, the total number of pages is three by way of example. An overlay printing application can determine, after analyzing all attachment data items, the need for one blank page to be inserted. However, it is too late to insert the blank page because the individual pages have been subjected to a drawing process. After a merge process using attachment data and form data has been completed for data for the first page, the overlay printing application issues drawing data to a graphical device interface (GDI) module of an operating system (OS) to print the data 801 for the first page. Data 802 for the second page and data 803 for the third page are further issued in a sequential manner. When the overlay printing application recognizes that the third page is the final page after issuing drawing data for the third page to the GDI module, it is too late to insert a blank page between the second and third pages. It is therefore difficult to place the third page on the back cover (last page) of the book and the user may not necessarily obtain the book as desired.
The overlay printing application can execute a process of generating a print job after determining the total number of pages in advance by analyzing all attachment data items, thereby inserting a blank page so that a final page can be placed on the back cover of the book. However, this method may cause a problem of increasing the processing time.